Cat owners commonly use litter boxes for their cats to use as a bathroom. Increasingly popular fillers for these boxes are clumping cat litters. Clumping litters have the characteristic that when the granules that make up the litter are wetted; these granules will stick together to form a solid or semi solid clump. These clumps of wetted litter or waste, including the solid extrement of the animal are then removed via a scoop, essentially leaving the litter box in a clean state. The scoop is typically in the form of a sieve that lets the unused or clean litter granule pass through but not the larger clumps of waste. Typically the scoop must be run throughout the contents of the litter to find the waste as cats normally bury or cover their extrement. The scoop is normally stored somewhere outside of the litter container.
Attempts have been made to simplify the task of finding and removing the waste. Examples of such attempts are shown in the following U.S. patents.